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Columns

Students Good, Students Bad. It is the great internal conflict that is to Mount Pleasant that Tastes Great and Less Filling used to be for bland rice beer back in the 1980s. We have, as a perfect symbol of it, the house at the corner of Main and High streets. It’s address is 714 S. Main.

Columns

It is sometimes hard to believe, but as fractious and roiling in dispute as the Republican Party has become in recent years it still has nothing on liberals for being able to stage a circular firing squad. Example the latest of this comes courtesy the annual Netroots Nation convention this last weekend.

Columns

Right about now, I imagine two things are happening: Your pets are finally coming out of their July 4 hiding places and people are starting to again open their windows without fear that some knucklehead will wake them at 4 a.m. with loud explosions and drunken, “Woo-hoos.” It’s also been a few days since anyone has compared the town they live in to Fallujah or any of the other prominent Middle East battlefields we spent blood and treasure bringing to the public...

Columns

Dear aggrieved heterosexual,I was surfing social media when I saw your post about how last week’s Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage has oppressed you. The urge to respond was strong. It was a siren’s song, practically crying out, “Eeeeeeric, coooooooment,” which we both know would have just been the start. By the middle of the afternoon, I would have been exhausted from a Facebook quagmire and facing a hard deadline without so much as a...

Columns

If you want an idea about what to make of the overstuffed clown car of people running for the Republican presidential nomination next year, pick up a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s vital book “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.” The most interesting part of it is not Thompson’s signature drug reference-laden prose but in how he described how George McGovern was the surprise winner of the Democratic nomination that year.

Columns

If you want to know how badly the Republican Party has gone off the rails, it is that they are waging war on ideas championed by their hero, Saint Ronald of Reagan. I’m talking about the idea percolating around Lansing to fully eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit, which at the federal level Reagan called a great way to address poverty. Today, the war on poverty has shifted, however. It’s no longer ending poverty that concerns our political elite. It’s ending...

Columns

If we could somehow, this week, figure out a way to launch Mackinac Island into space, we’d do ourselves a very great service. I know, everyone loves Mackinac Island. It’s a jewel in Michigan’s crown. WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE FUDGE?